Cathy Feig has some advice for businesses thinking of trying to tap the growing, and lucrative, Chinese market:

Go some place else.

“Don’t make any quick decisions on China today,” Feig, the U.S. Foreign Commercial Officer in China, told a breakfast seminar of business leaders in Teaneck Wednesday.

Such are the difficulties and pitfalls of breaking into China, she said, “I want you to have export experience. Do not make China your first market. Practice on Canada. Practice on Western Europe.”

Feig spoke at a “Doing business in China” event organized by the Global Enterprise Network at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she outlined the top five challenges facing American companies in China – one of which might surprise anyone convinced that the U.S. education system lags China’s.

“They are having a hard time finding and retaining the people that they want to work,” she said. “U.S. companies come to me and say, ‘You know, we can’t find people straight out of Chinese schools that are ready to go into management positions and can take off and do it the way we want.”

“That’s just a difference of the education,” she said. “The education in China is more of a memorization and recitation. Whereas here in the universities we teach you to question and challenge, and improve.”